


There's Only One Girl In the World For You

by La_Pacifidora



Category: Community (TV)
Genre: Attempted Sexual Assault, Awkward Sexual Situations, F/M, Gen, Past Drug Use
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-03-07
Updated: 2014-03-07
Packaged: 2018-01-14 21:31:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,669
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1279597
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/La_Pacifidora/pseuds/La_Pacifidora
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eight People. Five months. Four romances. One house. What can possibly go wrong?</p><p>(Or that time I wrote one incredibly long joke about <i>Community</i> deserving an Emmy.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	There's Only One Girl In the World For You

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted [Milady/Milord on LJ between June 2010 and February 2011](http://milady-milord.livejournal.com/120649.html#cutid1). Un-beta'd.
> 
> Disclaimers: Not mine. Although I think Dan Harmon knows this friend of mine and based Troy on her… And the thanks to Wreckless Eric for his awesome song, from which I took my title.
> 
> Author’s note: This is for shan21non’s Ficcy Friday prompt for Greendale’s inaugural study abroad program.

It had been an excruciatingly long summer. This wasn’t to say it had been incredibly hot, or that the city had implemented water saving measures, like most of the state had back in 2005 because of the drought.

But the days that summer seemed to drag on and on, with few interruptions. 

Annie Edison had spent the day following The Night in her room at her parents’ house, doing her damnedest to put off answering her mother’s questions about why she hadn’t gone with Vaughn (So far, her mom seemed to be accepting Annie’s excuse that she had suddenly felt violently ill. Annie felt a little bad about delivering this excuse while giving her mom an ‘aw, shucks’ look, but she figured if made her mom understand ‘violently ill’ as code for ‘I suddenly realized I was heading nearly 1,800 miles away with a guy I’ve been dating for a couple of months because he wanted to play _hackey sack_ ,’ well, so much the better.), reading the copy of Vanity Fair she’d picked up yesterday to read in the car, and not waiting for Jeff to call her.

Because, Annie told herself, she wasn’t going to be that girl: The one who waited pathetically, checking her cell every five minutes to see if a guy who hadn’t expressed anything about his intentions (Not that they’d had much time to talk on The Night, following The Kiss, as the crowd had come spilling out and Jeff gave her an apologetic look before he took off for his car when he saw Britta and Slater trying to look over heads to see if he was still there.). No. That was _old_ Annie behavior; it was destructive and silly and dammit, why hadn’t he called her yet?

After a full 24 hours of Jeff not calling her, Annie lay in her bed in the wee morning hours, considering her next step. Her first thought was to make a list of all the reasons why Jeff hadn’t called her yet. (Maybe he’d been exposed to some horrible disease and even now was wasting away in his apartment. Should she check the CDC’s website?) She had started to sit up when she realized making a list of reasons was, to use the self-help parlance she’d become so familiar with in the last two years, rationalizing. And, she thought sternly, it was also enabling Jeff’s immaturity. And enabling was bad. So: Annie was not going to make a list of all the possible (and improbable) reasons Jeff hadn’t called her yet. 

She spent the next few minutes weighing whether she should make a list of reasons for why Jeff was a stupid poo head, with stupid, touchable hair and stupid, strong, muscle-y arms and stupid, stupid eyes that softened every time they met hers and made her feel like she was melting into a pile of gooey Annie goop…

OK. Making a list of reasons why Jeff was stupid was also out.

Fifteen minutes later, when Annie finally removed the pillow from her head, where she’d put it there to muffle her frustrated yelling, she decided to stop over-thinking the situation. She glanced at the clock on her bedside table: 5:40 a.m. 

Right. Then her next step would be to get out of bed. After that, she dug out her running tights, an exercise tank, and her running shoes from a box buried at the back of her closet. She stretched, slipped her drivers license and house key into the hidden pocket in the armband that held her iPod, grabbed that and her headphones, and pulled her hair into a ponytail.

Long before she’d turned to pills – and before the pills, there’d been coffee and before coffee there’d been calorie counting and before that…well, there’d been a lot of angry poetry in notebooks she’d finally burned when she’d come home from rehab – there’d been running. The smell of the air in the morning used to be the only high Annie needed. But she hadn’t been running since the early part of her sophomore year in high school. 

Forty minutes later, Annie came back in through the front door and headed to the kitchen, where she nodded to her father and made herself a glass of orange juice. 

Mr. Edison looked at his daughter over the top of the business section, taking in the hair plastered to her forehead, the sheen of sweat on her shoulders, and the almost complete lack of tension in her appearance.

“Good run?”

“Yep.”

“There’s still a couple of cinnamon bagels left in the bag.”

“Thanks.”

“You want a section of the paper?”

Annie was silent for a moment, staring into the fridge she’d just opened to retrieve the bag of bagels. Without turning to face her father, she spoke.

“Um. The classifieds section? And the arts page?” Annie cleared her throat. “Please?”

Mr. Edison pulled the two sections from the stack at his elbow and put them in front of one of the other chairs at the kitchen table.  
***  
The day after the Tranny Dance was the last Annie spent waiting for Jeff to call her. 

She started running again, every morning before most people in Greendale got up to start their days.

She’d spent most of a day combing through the want ads, then most of the next visiting different shops that were hiring. 

She finally found a job at a tutoring center that paid well above minimum wage, plus tips.

At the beginning of July, she started seriously looking into what apartments were available. And quickly realized that even with her savings account and her job and the tips (not to mention the occasional checks she received from The Greendale Inquirer, where she’d managed to pester the editor into letting her write articles on a freelance basis), she was never going to be able to afford a place on her own.

As it turned out, one of Annie’s father’s associates had a daughter who’d gone off to a state school, come down with a nasty case of encephalitis her sophomore year that she’d only barely survived and had transferred to Greendale Community College to get her academic legs back under her. The 20-year-old daughter appreciated her parent’s help but politely told them there was no way in hell she was moving back home.

So, by the end of July, Annie had a roommate, a new apartment, and a job she enjoyed that paid her well for doing something she was already good at doing.

And if she still occasionally checked her cell first thing in the morning and last thing before she went to sleep and, some days, obsessively in between, it didn’t mean anything. 

And if she made a point of seeing if Jeff had tweeted anything telling every time she checked her Twitter feed and ground her teeth a little when all he seemed to do was check in at Starbucks and complain about the crappy reruns on network TV and the unbelievable shows on cable, it didn’t mean anything.

Just like it didn’t mean anything that every time she signed into Facebook, casually checked Jeff’s status, and it remained blank.

Nope. It didn’t mean anything at all.   
***  
A week before classes started, Annie received an email from Dean Pelton, asking her to come to a meeting the Friday before the first day of classes. When she called his office, the summer student worker said the dean wasn’t in right then, and all he knew about the meeting was the dean had asked for emails to be sent to several Greendale students.

Parking in the school lot later that week, Annie checked that her hair wasn’t a mess (wearing it down when she drove with the windows open wasn’t always the best idea). It had been a long day at work, with several elementary school kids who were funny, smart, and fun to work with; and a high school boy who thought that because Annie was close to his age, it was appropriate for him to hit on her and not pay attention to his lessons. 

Locking her car door, she started walking toward the main building. She didn’t really want to spend an hour listening to the dean be weird when all he probably wanted was confirmation she’d help organize more events this fall.

She didn’t take much notice of the minivan parked close to the entrance; the Mercedes with a vanity plate reading “HAWT-69” and a “Go Broncos!” sign in the rear window; or the jaunty little Suzuki with a large magnet on the side reading “Nadir’s Nummies.”

And she certainly didn’t notice the black Lexus parked in a far corner, in the shade of the hedge surrounding the parking lot, or the man sitting in the driver’s seat.  
***  
“Miss Edison! Hello! Please, have a seat,” Dean Pelton said, gesturing to one of the extra seats crammed into his office. 

It took Annie a minute to realize the reason for the extra furniture. Pierce was seated in the chair that was always next to the dean’s desk, fiddling with his phone. Abed and Troy were sitting on chairs in front of the filing cabinets along one wall, their heads bent together over a large sketchbook where it looked like they might be creating a storyboard. Shirley and Britta were camped out on the deans’ couch, with large tote bags at their sides and digital cameras in each of their hands. It looked like they were showing each other photos of what they’d been up to over the summer.

Annie took one of the two remaining seats closest to the couch, waving at Abed and Troy as they looked up and nodded in greeting to her before returning to their sketchbook. Shirley reached over and squeezed Annie’s arm in greeting, while Britta looked up and smiled before her camera beeped at her and she turned back to it, swearing softly. Pierce just kept punching away at something on his phone.

“Well, I don’t want to take up too much of your time,” Dean Pelton began, perching on the front of his desk, “so I suppose I’ll just get started. The reason I’ve asked you all here today is-”

“Whoa. Sorry I’m late, Dean. Traffic, you know?” Jeff swept into the office, and Annie felt like she couldn’t breathe. Which, she thought as she tried to draw in air, kind of sucked considering some evil person had clearly wired this chair up to an electrical transformer; there was no other explanation for the buzz she felt running along under her skin.

Meanwhile, Jeff fist-bumped with Troy; nodded at Abed; sidestepped the dean; fended off Pierce’s attempt at a fancy secret handshake; said ‘hello’ to Britta; and bent halfway to meet Shirley, who stood to give him a hug. He turned to Annie, who was checking her purse for a hair tie and quite successfully avoiding his eyes as she searched through her bag like it was twice the size it actually was.

“Milady.”

“Oh. Hi, Jeff.” There! She’d spoken to him. And she hadn’t done or said anything stupid, like slap him. Or ask him what the hell he thought he’d been doing all summer that he couldn’t call her. Or who the hell he thought he was that he could just come around, Milady-ing her like he hadn’t thoroughly inspected her throat with his tongue a little more than 10 weeks ago. And then not called her. 

“Well, as I was saying when Mr. Winger arrived,” the dean continued as Jeff sat in the remaining chair next to Annie. She could feel Jeff’s eyes on her, but she resolutely would not look at him. So she focused on the dean’s face and pulled her hair back into a ponytail. “The reason I asked you all here today was to offer you an opportunity, as a group, that’s not yet available to the rest of Greendale’s student body.”

“This doesn’t have anything to do with Dalmatians, does it?” Pierce asked, his expression half-disgusted and half-intrigued.

“What? No, no no nonono. What?” The dean was now fidgeting and squeezed past Troy and Abed to sit behind his desk.

“Are there going to be cookies involved? Or dodge balls?” Troy asked, his excitement about both equal.

“No. The dean is probably referring to some sort of program or activity that is so new we will, essentially, be the guinea pigs for it. Our decision to accept or decline the opportunity will likely lead to some sort of dramatic shift in the group dynamic, especially if we’re divided as to what we should do. And, given that last season we exhausted most of the spaces on campus, the dean’s proposition-” Abed said, steepling his fingers.

“Please, never use those two words in the same sentence. Ever. Again.” Jeff interjected, a pained look on his face. Then he leaned forward, acting like he was checking his shoe lace but trying to catch Annie’s eye.

“My apologies. The dean’s proposal-” Abed paused for Jeff to nod his approval. “The proposal will mean a move for our group to a local setting but still off-campus. Or, if the budget for our second season is significantly higher, we may even move out of Greendale. Or Colorado.” 

“All I know is this opportunity better not be ‘real’ the way priority registration was ‘real’,” Shirley said, giving the dean the stink eye and using air quotes.

“No, I assure you all, this opportunity is entirely legitimate. As you may know, the administration here at Greendale is always trying to find new and interesting ways to enrich our students’ learning experience. And, if it happens to level the playing field in the world of academia, then we especially like an idea. After all, there’s absolutely no reason why those snobs at Colorado State get to think that they are the only school in the entire state. It’s ridiculous. I mean, what do they have that we don’t? Huh?” The group watched as the dean worked himself into a tizzy, snapping the pencil he’d been holding as he spoke.

“Of course. So, what unique experience is Greendale looking to offer us this time? A clinical trial to determine how much crazy people can absorb from spending any time on campus?” Jeff spoke, keeping his voice level and motioning to the rest of the group not to make any sudden movements.

“No, Mr. Winger. Don’t be silly. Greendale would never tell students if a study was being conducted on them.” The dean smiled, opening a drawer, dropping the broken pencil into it, and closing it again. “Actually, after much work on the part of the administration, the faculty, and the board of trustees, Greendale Community College is pleased to announce that we will begin offering a study abroad program, starting this semester. Well, actually, starting officially next semester. We’d like you, all of you, this group, to be our first study abroad group. What do you say?” The dean leaned back in his chair.

“Oh, that’s nice!” Shirley looked surprised but pleased.

Pierce looked dumbfounded. But that might have had something to do with the fact that his phone, a minute after the dean finished speaking, started making a noise like a parrot squawking.

Britta was bemused, her brow furrowed and the fingers of one hand tapping against her leg.

Jeff looked surprised and frustrated. (Annie suspected the frustration was because she still hadn’t looked at him.)

Troy looked…well, Troy always looked a little blank. But he looked a little more blank than usual, though his forehead was wrinkled as he considered the dean’s offer.

Abed appeared to be studying Annie and Jeff, one eyebrow quirked and his head tilted a little to one side.

So Annie gave Abed a smile, tried to consciously relax her posture a little, and pulled a notebook and pen from her bag as she spoke.

“Now, Dean, when you say ‘study abroad’, what exactly do you mean?”


End file.
